Te Upoko O Mata'oho (Mangere Mountain): The Performative Tensions of a Living Museum (Essay‪)‬

The development of an education centre in the early 1980s as a living museum at Mangere, South Auckland, Aotearoa (New Zealand), began with the purpose of enabling members of the local tribal group, or iwi, to tell their own stories about work, being and colonisation. It was to reflect their ongoing struggle to be able to live and work as recognised as iwi, to talk and show, in a living form, how their ancestors grew crops, lived and sustained family relationships, whanaungatanga. The story of the living museum shows how their important beliefs, their tikanga, and their rights under the Treaty of Waitangi create tensions for local government policy and the civic development of Auckland. The market-based approaches and procedures of local government in the twenty-first century do not readily accommodate collective ways and Maori process. This paper examines the ways that this community volunteer-based organisation, grounded in principles of reciprocity and collectivity, has been shaped, through performative requirements, as a market-modelled organisation. This article examines the development of the education project to create a 'living museum' at the important historical site of Te Upoko o Mata'oho, (1) also known as Mangere Mountain, in Auckland, New Zealand. Te Upoko o Mata'oho is one of the best preserved of Auckland's many volcanoes. This area was once a highly cultivated and strategically developed pa (fortified village) for local Maori. The local Maori people (iwi), called Waiohua, and archaeologists and geologists suggest that Te Upoko o Mata'oho and its surrounds was once home to around 2,000 people, making it one of the largest precolonial Polynesian settlements in the world. (2)